I grew up in South Africa and did my undergraduate and Masters degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. I then worked in the environmental and mineral exploration industries as a researcher in remote sensing. After several years working in industry, I returned to academia and completed a PhD at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in Portsmouth (UK). This was followed by postdocs at the Universities of Cambridge and Chicago. I then had a five year postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford. In December 2011, I was appointed in a continuing position as a lecturer at the University of Canterbury.

the main focus of my current research is in finding non-gravitational evidence for dark matter. This has led me to investigate the astrophysics of the Galactic Center. It is there that the non-gravitational signatures of dark matter are likely to be largest but unfortunately there are also a lot of astrophysical processes taking place in that location. These processes have to be accurately accounted for before one can determine if there is any residual dark matter self-annihilation signal.

In the initial session, of my summer school talks, I will give an introductory talk on statistics and introduce technical terms like the mean, variance, central variance, moment, probability distribution function, coverage, etc. This talk will mostly be on the frequentist approach.

In the second session I will focus more on Bayesian statistics. I will cover the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm and also discuss model comparison.

I am a lecturer in mathematics and a researcher in cosmology. I studied mathematics in Cambridge (DAMTP) but switched to astrophysics for my PhD (at the Institute of Astronomy). I spent 5 years in the Oxford Astrophysics group. I am now part of the new E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull in Yorkshire, England.

My hybrid maths-physics background means that my cosmology research often have a robust mathematical flavour. However, they do also feature strong numerical and statistical aspects.

I am interested in a wide range of topics in cosmology, including inflation, dark energy, large-scale structure and gravitational waves, as well as more astrophysical topics such as the intergalactic medium and large-scale magnetic fields.

In my lecture, I will be highlighting some statistical aspects that have featured in my work — namely, working with non-Gaussian distributions, and extreme-value statistics, keeping in mind the many potential applications within astrophysics and beyond.

Currently, I am the lecturer at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn

University. My research interest includes “Searching for magnetic monopole with Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector", “Searching for new physics using monojet signal at the LHC”, and “Searching for invisible Higgs in vector boson fusion channel”. For the responsibility of Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) operation, I am current convener (2014-2015) of the Physics Data-Monte Carlo Validation (PdmV) team, under the Physics Performance and Dataset (PPD) group. I was the contact person of Physics validation for Exotica group, a Monte Carlo contact person of Higgs-Exotica group, and a Data Quality Monitoring (DQM) developer, and validator for both JetMET trigger and SUSY groups. I also gave short lectures in Physics Analysis Tools (PAT) in PAT tutorials at CERN in 2011, and 2012.